Firefly Fanfic: Here's How It Wasn't
by CharacterDriven
Summary: We know how it was. But in this story, River gives her shipmates a little glimpse of how it wasn't: Once again, Serenity turns out to be more than the sum of her parts. Like my writing? I have a fanfic contest entry, "Serenity After Miranda: Autumn Flower" at inkitt dot com slash conman. Please go read, & click the heart to upvote! Thanks.
_**HERE'S HOW IT WASN'T**
_ **A Firefly Fan Fiction  
by Alana Dill  
**

 **aka CharacterDriven**

 _Setting: Sometime after War Stories, but before Heart of Gold.  
_

* * *

Serenity exterior: Inara's shuttle docks with the ship. Happy music.

Interior, Galley:

Inara walks into the Galley all dressed up from an appointment. She's wearing a simple, but very expensive, diamond pendant, a sexy outfit of gold silk and green brocade, and a little purse hangs off one shoulder. Her look is bohemian and elegant, as usual.

Wash enters from the bridge side, smiling at Inara: "And there she is."

Zoë follows Wash: "Welcome back!"

Inara: "It's good to be home." Pours herself some water. Peers at it, pours it through a filter with a rueful grimace and waits for it to drip through.

Book is setting the table. "Good to see you joining us."

Inara smiles and pulls up a chair. "Thank you."

Mal is already seated. He smirks. "Worked up an appetite?"

Inara nods, narrowing her eyes at him. "I could eat all night, if there were anything around worth the trouble."

Mal doesn't quite know how to respond to that. He decides to keep his damn fool mouth shut, turns to look at Kaylee, and cheers up when she pecks him atop his head. He gets a whiff of steam from her pot of food, and wrinkles his nose. "That smells..." he searches for the right words.

Kaylee, serenely, interrupts: "You don't have to be nice. It just smells, that's all."

Jayne sets down a large pan of little green balls, and Kaylee dumps her steamer potful of white cubes into it. Wash looks at the green-and-white geometric puzzle. "Speaking of trouble... What is that?"

Jayne: "Balls to the Wall. Imitation peas with tofu blocks."

Wash winces: "Sorry I asked."

Zoë pokes at a serving dish of granular white stuff. "This almost looks like rice."

River frowns down at the food. "I don't like peas."

Mal sprinkles his food, then passes a little bottle of red chili flakes to Inara. "Numbs the mouth. You'll thank me later."

Book: "Some folk would be glad to eat food with an actual color and shape to it."

As the food is passed around, Book silently says grace to himself. Everyone tucks in and starts eating, except River. The food is obviously pretty vile.

Kaylee tries to distract herself, speaking to Inara: "Ooh, that's a pretty necklace."

Mal: "Is it real?"

Inara touches it at her throat, having forgotten she was still wearing it: "Yes. A gift from a client." She looks a tad uncomfortable at the attention. Mal deliberately looks away from it, saying nothing more about it.

Jayne gives it a greedy appraisal: "I bet that thing's worth more than this ship."

Kaylee: "Nothin's worth more than this ship."

Simon smiles at Kaylee. "I'm sure a few things are." He quails at Kaylee's glare. "Like, uh, bigger ships?"

River is methodically taking blocks of tofu from the serving platter, one at a time, with her chopsticks. She is arranging them carefully in a circle on her otherwise empty plate. She speaks dreamily. "Nothing's worth more than Serenity."

Kaylee's triumphant, gives Simon a nudge, and, still chewing, crows: "See?"

Jayne is looking nervously at River: "Oh, no, here she goes."

Simon sees something isn't right: "River...?"

As River speaks, we see a movie playing in her head, a fuzzy enactment of what might have been, but only the parts that matter to her. Her voice is high, childlike and dreamy. "Malcolm Reynolds shows up at the shipyard a day late. A day... later. Serenity gets hauled away, and she winds up completely scrapped, never becoming what she should have been. The last of her is melted down at an Alliance munitions factory. The sum of her parts is worth more than she was put together." _In her head, River sees guns rolling down a conveyor then plopped into packing._

Kaylee's staunch. "Now that just ain't true."

River persists. _We watch the fuzzy movie in her head as she describes it._ "Captain Reynolds buys a Capissan-driven scow that he names _'Revenge'._ It takes off fine, then aborts launch, crashes, and catches fire on its first test flight. He's burned past recognition, and paralyzed from the waist down. After three agonizing days in the hospital, his best friend, Zoë Alleyne, blows his head off and runs from the feds."

Mal and Zoë glance at one another, eyebrows raised. Zoë shrugs denial. Mal waves it off. They've both seen PTSD before.

Nobody but Jayne is eating now.

Simon: "River?"

River describes the scene in her head. _The background is blurred out; only the people are important to her:_ "Zoë takes mercenary work with a man named Badger. She becomes involved in a turf war between Badger and a rival boss. She is shot and killed in a firefight by one of his goons. Jayne Cobb." River's circle of tofu is on its second tier of blocks. It's beginning to look like a tower.

Jayne: "What the... Zoë! I didn't..."

Zoë: "I know." To Simon, she adds, "Can you shut her up." It's not a request. Simon gestures helplessly.

River continues, the entire room silent, mesmerized. Only Mal, who's already still mostly dead inside, remains somewhat nonchalant. She's been working at waking him up, ever since he woke her from the box, but it's been slow. He always fights it. He doesn't even know he's trying to stay dead.

 _River sees Kaylee rolling out from underneath an engine, pulled into a stand by a man who pulls her into an embrace. Her wrench clatters to the ground by their feet._ "Kaywinnit Lee Frye had unprotected sex with a charming pilot named Hoban Washburne, whom she met while working on a busted engine. He never even asked her name. He left her pregnant. Because of radiation scarring on her Fallopian tubes, Kaylee died from an ectopic pregnancy at 5 weeks' gestation." _Kaylee's father stands alone by her grave, and tosses a handful of dirt down onto a pressboard coffin with a little smiling sun painted on it._

Wash: "I never... People die from that?"

Kaylee whimpers. "Out here, they do." She shudders, then winces at Zoë's steely glare. "I would never. I mean, not now that I know you."

Zoë nods tersely. "Never happened." She looks over at Wash in silent speculation: _"Did it?"_

Inara pats Kaylee's shoulder, then she exchanges a glance with Simon, who looks troubled. River's eyes remain closed, as if she's in REM, flashing through different scenarios. River doesn't speak, _but she watches Simon scanning Kaylee's belly with an ultrasound, saying too optimistically, "Don't worry, we can fix this!" then leaning over to kiss her below the navel, and Kaylee tenderly stroking his hair._

Zoë looks coldly at Wash.

Wash shrugs. "What. _What!_ Oh, come on. You shot Mal!"

Mal: "Nobody shot anybody. But if things go that way, she'd better." He and Zoë raise cups to each other, a silent pact. Wash picks up his glass then, thinking better of the idea, sets it down again.

Jayne takes a drink of his brandy.

Mal takes Jayne's bottle, his hand shaking just slightly, and pours some into his own coffee, topping it up. His voice is light and dangerous as a razor blade in a balloon. "I think we've heard enough. Wash, how long till we reach Haven?"

Wash: "Haven? Oh, twenty hours at most..."

River's eyes are still closed. She looks angry. " _Listen!_ Hoban Washburne signed on with an inexperienced captain... who tried to outrun a Reaver ship. They awoke an instinctive chase response. When they were overcome, Washburne was tortured till he became a Reaver himself." _In her mind, she fast forwards through Wash being pulled into a crowd of Reavers, into darkness. Then she sees his silhouette, at the helm of a Reaver ship; he turns to her with a snarl, one eye gone, his face scarred almost past recognition._ She cringes back in her chair, speaking fast. "Wash's Reaver band attacked the church at Kaylee's funeral. The presiding Shepherd, an itinerant named … named Derrial Book, took command of the situation, grabbed a gun from a bystander, and shot Wash. The gun that killed him contained metal smelted down from a Firefly Class Three."

Book clears his throat and decides to say nothing. He hasn't told any of them his first name.

Mal nibbles a fingernail and glares at Simon. " _Can_ you shut her up?"

Simon shakes his head, not taking his eyes off River, who is on the fifth level of her tofu bricks. "Maybe, if someone can get my bag. I don't want to leave her like this. If you don't mind."

Mal: "I _do_ mind." He's blustering at Simon, a little worried about River, but really more concerned about her giving his crew the jitters. It's really no more than a ghost story. But Serenity only has one ghost, and he's still walking around.

Simon persists. "It's helpful to see her thought processes."

Inara gripes: "Helpful to whom?" She stands up, meaning to retrieve Simon's bag from the infirmary, but stops at the door, dreading what River will say. And that her own secret will be revealed.

River: "After the Reavers had all been killed, and Kaylee safely buried, the Shepherd was allowed to sleep in the church that night before going on his way. Jayne Cobb broke in to steal some coin out of the collection box. Book woke up, and Cobb strangled him, then took off to a whorehouse with the collection money."

Jayne is crestfallen: "I did two things? Why did I have to do two things?"

Kaylee pats Jayne's hand kindly. "Because you're a very bad man."

Jayne: "At least it weren't all in the same gorram day."

River: "Inara Serra had been a Companion. She came out to the Black to find..." she pauses, confused. So many lovers, so many places... and tea shops, everywhere she went. Tea shops. "To search for - for clientele. She hitched a ride on the wrong ship. The bad ship. And disappeared off the face of the Verse. She was sold into a brothel on the ass-end of space, drugged so heavily she didn't even remember her own name." River pauses. "Inara, she got... she got sick. She spent all her time blissed out on Blue Sugar. They called her Nari. She was so busted up, most customers passed her over. She ended up begging in the street." _River saw Inara squatting in an alley, her hair ratted, smiling blearily up at a potential customer. Most of her teeth were gone, and her face was covered with sores. The customer walked away, dropping a crumpled bill on the ground. She scrambled for it, cursing._

River's tower wall is now five bricks high. "After absconding with the church collections, Jayne Cobb spent the night with a different whore, but law enforcement had trailed him from Book's murder. Jayne went out the back alley to stumble over Nari."

Jayne scowled. "Now, this ain't fair."

Inara was frozen, mesmerized.

River's eyes flicked open briefly, and she spoke coldly to Jayne. "Life ain't fair, Jayne." She continued again, more softly. "Nari. She was being stabbed to death by an angry john. He dropped his knife, pushed her at Jayne, then ran. Inara bled all over him as she died in his arms. This was enough to get Jayne Cobb strung up in the town square fifteen minutes later."

Jayne blew out a harsh breath and sat back, scratching at his head: "So I didn't kill Inara? That's a mighty big relief."

Inara, sarcastic: "No, Jayne. Thanks for your support." She looks oddly relieved herself.

Mal's face is white as a sheet. River has named his deepest fears, and his own death isn't one of them.

River's voice shakes, and tears come: "Simon Tam." She drops a pea into the tower.

Now Simon looks a bit green. "You can stop, _Mei Mei_. This is all a dream. Wake up."

River: "Simon Tam kidnapped his sister from an elite private school dormitory. Tam managed to travel with her as far as Landsdown Docks, where he was apprehended by Alliance Agent Lawrence Dobson. Simon was diagnosed an obsessive psychopath and placed in a secure psychiatric ward, where he..."

Now Simon's sweating. "River..."

 _"Oh, Simon."_ River sobs, speechless a moment. _She sees him rocking, alone, in a dark, padded cell._

Kaylee: "It's ok, River.'"

River grows agitated, but can't speak above a whisper. "River Tam was returned to the... the Academy." She stops, now bent over the table, her hair hanging over her plate, her hands on the table, eyes closed but streaming tears. "She's still there, strapped to a chair, needles everywhere, in her brain and her spine, trying to remember something that never happened... people she never knew... the blue..."

Before anyone can stop him, Mal grabs the hair back of River's head, pulls her upright, and slaps her cheek. Not too hard. " _Enough_." His voice is forceful, yet almost a whisper.

Her eyes fly open and she stares at him blankly, grasps his wrist and presses a point that makes his hand go numb (which he carefully conceals). Each member of the crew reacts in their own way.

Zoë remains silent, ready for trouble as always. When Wash rises with a shout, she holds him back with a gentle gesture; everyone else talks at once. Inara runs to Mal, angry, ready to intervene.

Simon: "What are you..."

Inara: "Mal, no!"

Book: "Now see here..."

Jayne: "'Bout time."

Kaylee: "How could you?"

Mal ignores them, speaking firmly but not unkindly to River. "Snap to. You've made your point." He releases her hair and shakes his hand out as if he's pinched a nerve. River's head remains up. She blinks hard, trying to focus on his face.

River slowly emerges from her trance, looks around the room, and sees the concern and anxiety in their faces. She smiles tentatively, but her voice is shaky. She turns back to Mal, speaking directly to him. Her pronouncement is oddly reassuring, as if knowing he'd questioned his own state of being, had trouble separating dream from waking life. "You're here. It's okay." Then she looks around at the crew and announces with a sunny smile, "We're all here."

Mal glances at his own hand, where he slapped her, as if wondering what he'd done with it. He settles back down into his own chair. "Where else would we be?" Mal pauses, struggling to think of something normal to say.

Wash: "Apparently, any number of places."

Mal knocks River's tower down with his fork, then adds: "Now eat your peas."

River pouts. "I don't like canned peas." The pink mark on her cheek has already faded.

Book grins around the table jovially, his brows raised: "Does _anybody_ here like canned peas?"

Inara comes back to the table and sits. "I hate canned peas." She maneuvers one delicately into her mouth with chopsticks. "But... I can live with them. Could be worse."

Wash has collected the can from the counter, and examines the label: "These are actually 'tinned imitation pea-like product.'"

Jayne commiserates. "Tofu's worse." He pops a white block into his mouth.

Kaylee to Simon: "I'll eat 'em if you will."

Simon picks one up with chopsticks and pops it into his mouth. "Tasty." He's obviously lying.

Zoë takes her fork and feeds Wash some peas.

Wash: "Manna from heaven. Delivered by a goddess."

Mal puts a pea on his fork and catapults it onto River's plate. It bounces around among the fallen tofu blocks then lands in the exact center, next to the other single pea.

River picks it up, tests it out in her mouth, then swallows. She's fully recovered.

River: "Right. Could be worse." Businesslike, to Book: "Pass the peas?"

Book: "With pleasure, child."

Mal and Simon speak simultaneously: "Say please."

River rolls her eyes and grins at them. "Pleeeease."

Inara is staring at Mal like she's never seen him before. She takes the diamond necklace off and places it in her little purse.

Kaylee looks at her questioningly.

Inara answers her look quietly, hoping Mal won't notice, and also hoping that he will: "It itches." She takes another bite of her peas.

Mal (who always notices) smiles over at her, and lobs a pea in her direction. Inara picks it out of her shirt, tosses it back, but she aims badly. Inara's missile is interrupted by Zoë, whose look mixes amusement with irritation. She takes the squashed pea in her palm and mashes it into Mal's hair.

Zoë: "I think she intended this for you."

Mal: "Hey!"

Inara giggles, embarrassed. "Sorry."

Wash, protectively, to Inara: "Hey, that's my wife." His pea smacks Kaylee on the forehead. He turns to Zoë. "Pre-emptive strike!"

Zoë smiles fondly. "It's all about strategy." She lobs a pea at Jayne. "And execution."

Jayne has, meanwhile, found a straw and loaded it up; a pea whizzes across the table and smacks Simon between the eyes. River looks at Simon and laughs when he crosses his eyes.

Kaylee tosses a pea at Wash, it misses and hits Book on the cheek.

Book looks at her, mock-sternly. "You know it's a sin to waste food."

Kaylee looks uncertain.

Jayne: "All very well, Shepherd..."

Kaylee finishes it for him, giggling: "But this ain't food."

Mal lobs another pea at Book. "Good luck hittin' any kneecaps."

Book grins. "Non-lethal projectiles are something of a specialty in my order."

Then the Pea War begins in earnest. Chaos ensues. Fade to black.

Serenity's exterior. Happy music, and their laughter and shouts fades away as the ship passes us by, on her merry way to somewhere else.

* * *

 _03/05/16_

 _Fan Fiction homage, based on Joss Whedon's Firefly. Not for monetary gain. 12:54:05 AM_

 _CharacterDriven, aka Alana Dill_


End file.
